Leisa frowned as she watched the girl David had been given charge of leave the park. She’d gone to watch the meeting only on a hunch, but she was very glad she had. This could be very bad. Someone was messing with the girl’s mind; she’d been able to pick that much up before the girl left. She’d need to take a more thorough look soon, to see if she could identify the culprit. The mental fingerprints were familiar.

Whoever it was, they were planning to use Anna as some sort of weapon against the Order. If the girl was lucky, it might just be as a spy, but Leisa doubted that. Not with the anger she’d sensed being stirred up.

Then, there was David; she hadn’t expected what was happening to him either. She should have done. It was always a possibility, after all, especially in Haventon. The combination of grief, stress, the mental exercises he’d been doing and the nudging of his mind had awakened the latent psychic abilities most humans had.

Apparently, he was an empath and he’d been picking up Anna’s intense emotions without realising. She’d have to handle him carefully now. The mind of an emerging psychic could break all too easily even without someone pushing them. That was why most humans subconsciously repressed their powers – they were far too dangerous for the untrained and training was hard to come by.

Well that was one good thing about the Order. They might have become a bunch of maniacs who’d lost sight of their original purpose, for the most part, but over the centuries they’d learned the hard way to train their psychics. The problem was that they still weren’t especially good at spotting them before it was too late.

Well Leisa wasn’t going to let David go mad. He reminded her too much of her own centuries dead son. She’d let him down; she wouldn’t let David down.

David rubbed his neck and frowned in the direction of her current hiding place. Damn! He was hypersensitive at the moment. She concentrated on her shields and waited. After a moment, he shook his head, put his pad away and headed to the exit. She touched his mind gently and discovered he was going home. She almost followed him but decided against it. He was too likely to notice her right now.

***

David sat on his sofa with his feet up and read through Anna’s notes. To his surprise they seemed very thorough, so how had she made such a stupid mistake? He picked up the notebook about her innocent suspect and began leafing through it. By the time he finished, his stomach was churning again and not because she’d been stupid. Being a vampire might be all that the man was innocent of.

She’d moved too quickly, but he could see where the mistake had come from. David had investigated the same guy earlier that year. When he’d realised he was human, he’d pulled back and considered what to do about what he’d uncovered. He’d been meaning to talk to Tanya about it. Anna must have followed the same clues and not realised she’d found a purely human monster. It was a serious error, but in Haventon an understandable one. When you knew about the town’s supernatural underbelly, it was easy to forget what humans were capable of. Perhaps his fears were paranoia. She must have been vetted just like he had. But he couldn’t shake the feeling she was dangerous. He’d just have to be careful around his charge and keep his eyes open.

And Tanya had asked him to call, hadn’t she?

“What do you think of Anna?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “She makes me nervous for some reason. She reminds me of Sal at that age.”

Tanya laughed. “A little. Sal was a touch more unstable than Anna. She took Martin’s disappearance badly and really went off the rails.”

“I’m not so sure there’s much in it on the instability. She was mood swinging all over the place. But, Tan, I’ve read her notes about the guy she attacked by mistake. About the only thing she did wrong was move too quickly. I investigated him as well and have been meaning to talk to you about him. Yes, he’s human but there’s something fishy about him. I think he might be a serial killer.”

“What?” Tanya sounded like she was choking.

“Well, he picks up homeless girls, takes them home, and then they vanish. I’ve seen them go into his house, and they never come out. Her notes mention the same thing. It’s creepy.”

“Shit! I’ll need to bring this up with the Council. We don’t even consider the purely human monsters in training – it’s probably time we did. You think she just got jumpy?”

“Yeah, anywhere else she might have considered other things but here?”

Tanya snorted. “Yeah, we do seem to attract supernaturals, don’t we? Most places Hunters find maybe one or two a year – if that. I’ve known Hunters go over a year without even a suspect in some places. The Council has been trying to work out what’s different about Haventon and other hotspots for centuries. We still have no idea.”

“Maybe it’s something in the water,” David said. “But what should we do about this guy?”

“That’s a good question. Hell, we don’t even have a mechanism to anonymously alert the authorities in cases like this.” She gave a sigh. “Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. I should have read her notes when she asked. I know it’s not protocol, but it wouldn’t have taken long. I can’t believe I let myself get hidebound. I’ll swing around this evening and pick up the notebook. I want to look into this myself.”